01 January 2015

Best 10 Japanese Documentaries of All Time

Last month, the Gifu-based Italian
film critic Matteo Boscarol put out
a call for critics and fans of Japanese documentaries to put together their Best
10 Japanese Documentaries of all time on his new blogStoria(e) del documentario in
Giappone ~ percorsi ed esplorazioni nella storia del cinema di non-fiction
nipponico. It is always hard to
choose just ten films and then arrange them numerically, especially with a
country that has such a rich documentary tradition. My least favourite documentaries in Japan are
the television variety with their unnecessary voice-over narrations. I have chosen for my list a cross-section of
different documentary types in addition to the necessary classics.

1.
Tokyo Olympiad (東京オリンピック, Kon Ichikawa, 1965)

I have a personal connection to this
film, because my
aunt has a small cameo in it, but that is not why I have chosen in as my
number one Japanese documentary of all time.
Growing up with a sport teacher for a father I have seen countless
sports documentaries in my time, which I suspect was why the experience of
watching Tokyo Olympiad for the first time made such as impact on me. The scope of the film is like no other sports
documentary, and its focus not just on the great highs but also on the great
lows of the event makes the film unique.
It is also a brilliant (deliberate) counterpoint to Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia (1938), which in the 1960s was
the best sports film ever made in spite of its problematic subject matter. One of my favourite sequences is the
marathon, which I wrote about in World
Film Locations: Tokyo (ed. Chris MaGee, 2011). The marathon route followed the historic Kōshū Kaidō (甲州街道), one of
the Five Edo Routes (五街道) that connected the outer provinces
to the capital in ancient times.

2.
A Man Vanishes (人間蒸発, Shōhei Imamura, 1967)

This is such a brilliant film in the
way that it plays with our expectations as documentary spectators. It begins in a relatively straight-forward
way presenting itself as a documentary about the riddle of an ordinary man who
disappears without a trace. But instead
of presenting a mystery and then solving it, the film begins to cast doubt on
the nature of the missing man’s relationships, business ventures, and even the
role of the documentary filmmaker himself.
The complexity of humanity, and the difficulties in discerning what is
real from what is illusion are expertly probed in this film.

3.
Minamata: The Victims and Their World (水俣患者さんとその世界, Noriaki Tsuchimoto, 1971)

The first in a series of
documentaries Tsuchimoto made about the plight of victims of Minamata disease,
this film has become the standard for films about people suffering at the hands
of unfeeling corporations / governments. Read my review of this film to learn more.

4.
Pica-don (ピカドン, Renzō and Sayoko Kinoshita, 1978)

Following on the success of Chris
Landreth’s Ryan (2004) and Ari Folman’s
Waltz with Bashir (2008), the
animated documentary genre has grown in stature in recent years. In the 1970s, it was a genre rarely
used. The Kinoshitas’ powerful depiction
of the day an atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima uses cutout animation to
depict the horrors of that day. Based on
the testimony and drawings of survivors, the film drives home the message that
we should never forget and never allow this atrocity to happen again. Read my review
to learn more.

5.
The Shiranui Sea (不知火海, Noriaki Tsuchimoto, 1975)

Emotionally for me, this is the most powerful of Tsuchimoto’s documentaries about the Minamata disaster. Fishermen continue to fish the poisoned
waters, discarding their catch because it is inedible, because fishing is all
that they know. It explores just how deeply the mercury
poisoning has affected the community in Minamata, particularly the children –
innocent victims who have been neurologically scarred for life. See trailer for the Zakka Films release.

6.
Antonio Gaudi (アントニー・ガウディー, Hiroshi Teshigahara, 1985)

With very little spoken word, this
mesmerising film takes us on a cinematic journey through the fantastic career
of Catalan architect Gaudi (1852-1926). Alongside
films like Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil
(1983) and Dziga Vertov’s Man with a
Movie Camera (1929), it ranks among the most poetic documentary films of
all time for me.

7.
Genpin (玄牝, Naomi Kawase, 2010)

As I wrote in my
review of this film in 2011, this is the most is the most beautiful
documentary I have ever seen about child birth.
It is also the most informative for the way in which it records the
varied experiences, hopes, and fears of the women. Although the birthing methods might not
appeal to all women, I would encourage pregnant women to watch the film for an
alternative perspective on pregnancy and child birth.

8.
Hitomi Kamanaka’s films about nuclear power and radiation:

Hibakusha at the End of the World (ヒバクシャ世界の終わりに, 2003)

Rokkasho Rhapsody (六ヶ所村ラプソディー, 2006)

Ashes to Honey (ミツバチの羽音と地球の回転, 2010)

I really couldn’t decide which of Hitomi
Kamanaka’s films to rank as "the best" as they complement each other so well and the issues they
raise concerning radiation and the use of nuclear power in Japan are even more important
in the wake of the Fukushima disaster than they were when Kamanaka started out
on her cinematic journey. Read my
reviews of Rokkasho
Rhapsody and Ashes
to Honey to learn more. Her films
can be ordered from Zakka Films.

9.
AK: Akira Kurosawa (A.K. ドキュメント黒澤明, Chris Marker, 1985)

This documentary is not everyone’s
cup of tea with everyone from hard-core Kurosawa fans to even Vincent Canby of
the New York Times blasting it for a variety of reasons (read
my review of the film to learn more).
Often packaged as a DVD extra, the film is often mistakenly viewed as a
bad “Making of” Ran
(乱, 1985) documentary, but that is not what it is at
all. Marker has created a carefully
crafted homage not just to Kurosawa himself but to the team who worked closely
with him.

10.
ANPO: Art X War (Linda
Hoaglund, 2010)

An amazing
film about the psychological impact of war and occupation on the Japanese
psyche, as told through the art, photography, and films of the post-war
period. Read
my full review here.